Cook’s great apprentice in the Pacific: with the chart of Albany and the SW coast

First edition of this great voyage account, of considerable significance for re-asserting British trading rights on the Northwest Coast and also for discovery and cartography of the south-west coast of Australia. It is celebrated by Lada-Mocarski as ‘one of the most important voyages for the history and the cartography of the Northwest Coast in general and of Alaska in particular’. In 1790 Vancouver was given command of an expedition whose express purpose was to reclaim British rights to the Northwest Coast following the Nootka convention. He was also to re-examine the existence of a navigable passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and this voyage permanently laid to rest that theory. The artist on the voyage was John Sykes; the engravings here, after his drawings, include the first published views of California.

George Vancouver (1757-1798) got his early training as a midshipman and later Lieutenant on Cook’s second and third voyages. After his return he spent most of the 1780s in West Indian waters, before being appointed, in 1790, to the command of a major scientific expedition to focus on the northwest Pacific: the successes of Cook’s voyages were much in mind in the planning of this expedition, and it was no coincidence that Vancouver’s new command was named Discovery, explicitly in honour of the vessel of that name that had sailed on Cook’s third voyage. Vancouver sailed to the Pacific by way of Australia where, in 1791, he made landfall on the then largely unknown south-west coast and discovered and named King George III Sound (modern Albany). This was the first English visit to any part of the west coast since Dampier, whose poor reports had led to the neglect of that part of the continent. Indeed, the west was explicitly excluded from Governor Phillip’s otherwise extensive realm, with the western boundary of his authority stopping at the famous “Pope’s line”, the line that still constitutes the inland border of Western Australia.

After leaving the south-west coast, Vancouver unsuccessfully attempted to enter the Great Australian Bight, discovering and charting Point Hood on its western extremity. He then sailed past Van Diemen’s Land into the Pacific, visiting New Zealand, Hawaii, and the Northwest coast of America. During the course of three seasons, he surveyed Alaska, the Northwest Coast, investigated the Straits of Juan de Fuca, discovered the Strait of Georgia, and circumnavigated Vancouver Island. He visited San Francisco, Monterey and other Spanish Settlements in Alta California, and made three visits to the Hawaiian Islands where he introduced cattle from Monterey. The expedition’s storeship Daedalus sailed twice to Port Jackson, to deliver cattle and stores for the colony and despatches for Phillip - including Vancouver’s charts of the south-west coast of Australia - and others for transmission back to London. Daedalus also collected such stores as were available at Port Jackson for the expedition. Vancouver also mentions that his ship was carrying breadfruit for planting at Norfolk Island.

Cook would have approved of the accuracy of Vancouver’s charting, which survived almost unchanged into modern times, and certainly Vancouver had learned the lessons of long voyages from his old captain, with only five men of a complement of 180 being lost in over four years at sea. But it is also true that by 1794 Vancouver was subject to wild mood swings and erratic behaviour which led to him being feared and sometimes mocked by his men (in modern times it has been argued that he was suffering from some form of hyperthyroidism, possibly Grave’s Disease). His health was ruined by the time they returned to England in 1795. Vancouver retired to Petersham to prepare this publication for the press, but in an eerie foreshadowing of the fate of his successor Flinders, died at age 40 while the account was nearing publication.